


doodle

by kekinkawaii



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Epistolary, Fluff, M/M, Meet-Cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:55:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24213271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kekinkawaii/pseuds/kekinkawaii
Summary: Someone had taken a sharp object, a knife or a branch or something of the sort, and lightly etched letters into the wood.DW, it read.(In which Castiel strikes up a wordless conversation with a stranger.)
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 10
Kudos: 73





	doodle

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [doodle | Tradução/Translation PT-BR ✅](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28427934) by [Queen_von_Fantasien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queen_von_Fantasien/pseuds/Queen_von_Fantasien)



> Now with a translation by the lovely Queen_von_Fantasien! Thank you <333

It was sunny today. Good for walks.

Castiel cupped his mug of tea in his hands and lightly blew across the top, watching the steam part with his breath like a pair of curtains, unveiling the rays of daylight that streamed through his window. He could spot a cardinal perched atop the oak tree in his front yard, scarlet-red and startling. He wondered if it would nest there, like it did the year before. He hoped so: baby birds always lifted his moods in those gloomy, grey afternoons where nothing seemed to go right, and his heart ached for the company of someone that wasn’t only real in paper and ink. Today was cloudless, but for some reason he still felt that strange mix simmering inside, a bittersweet yearning for another voice.

Yes. A walk was a good idea.

He spent some time savouring the rest of his tea, before rinsing it out in the sink and fetching his coat. The sun was out, but it had been raining steadily a few days before that, and the temperatures were abnormally low.

The morning air hit him like a friendly acquaintance’s greeting, and he inhaled through his nose deeply, savouring the crisp scent of earth and grass. The forest trail was a minute’s walk away, but today he took longer than usual, steps slowed with thought. The sky was a painter’s blue, and he could only hear the sounds of his boots crunching the stray leaves on the dirt, no voices or vehicles in sight. For the first few days since he’d moved here, it had been odd, but it had been years with the same, and Castiel had gotten more or less used to it by now. He’d come to enjoy the tranquility of the outdoors, amplified by the lack of traffic.

He spotted two more cardinals on the way to the bridge, where the trail ended in a snarl of twisted bushes and tall, dry grass. The bridge seemed to lead into nowhere, abruptly ending with a conglomeration of weeds punctuated with fallen logs. He’d thought about going further a couple of times, but was always deterred by the thought of poison oak and spiders and snakes, and now it marked the end of his daily walk. 

Castiel stepped onto the rain-softened wooden planks and crossed to the middle, where he leaned against a railing and watched the small creek happily burbling by, the water so clear he could see right through it and spot the rocks that lined the riverbed.

The wood was still damp from the rain. Castiel smoothed a hand along the rough surface, and he was suddenly caught by an unexpected protrusion under the pads of his fingers.

He glanced down and saw that someone had taken a sharp object, a knife or a branch or something of the sort, and lightly etched letters into the wood.

 _DW,_ it read.

Castiel unexpectedly smiled. He had walked this path a thousand times, stood here and trailed his hands across the railing of this bridge—and yet, this was a first. The bridge was nearly four kilometres away from asphalt roads, and he’d seen the occasional group of cross-country runners or mountain bikers, but they’d never stopped by long enough to do something like this. No one readily explored this deeply into the woods. When he used to live in the city, he’d come across wooden signs vandalized with initials and distasteful drawings of all kinds. Here, he rarely saw anyone so far into these trails, much less a sign of their existence carved into the place.

He wondered who it was, this DW. Why they came. Why they suddenly had the urge to leave their mark.

The same feeling took over Castiel, now. He felt compelled to respond, to nudge back at this stranger: I’m here, too. I heard you.

He dug around in the pockets of his trenchcoat and emerged with an uncapped ballpoint pen, the ink emptied years ago. It was perfect, and he felt an inexplicable excitement rise inside of him as he positioned the tip right next to the initials on the bridge, and very carefully began to work. He struggled with the first letter, its curve stumping him in its smoothness, and followed in the footsteps of the stranger by simplifying it into three sharp, swift carves of his pen. The second was much easier, and he worked through it in just a few deliberate sweeps.

Then, with his heart pounding just a bit faster than usual, he stepped back and gazed at his work.

Next to the bold, crooked marks of _DW_ now stood a shallower, smaller _CN._

Satisfied, Castiel put the pen back into his pocket, then ran his fingers across the etchings. He felt rather guilty for slicing into the wood, even though it’d been at least over a decade since anyone had given their love and attention to the old, rotting bridge, made evident by the lack of maintenance over the winter, and the way the foot-trodden path slowly shrunk narrower and narrower each year, surrounded by overgrown ivy and moss.

This way, it felt as if the bridge were part of something. A pathway for communication, after its transportation was rendered null and void.

He walked back with a lighter step than usual, his mood lifted by the snaggle from his usual routine, even if it had just been a dash of an interaction—not even one, to be fair. It was more than he had in a while, to be perfectly honest.

He was looking forward to tomorrow’s walk.

The next day, he drank his tea with a bit more vigour than usual, nearly burning his tongue on the first sip. He shrugged on his coat and stepped out the door, telling himself to slow down and smell the flowers in his walk, to listen to the birds and feel the sun on his face, even if all of those sensations were felt with more distance than usual, his mind someplace else—specifically, on the railing of the bridge.

When he finally stepped onto the planks, he felt an odd disappointment settling into his gut when he saw that nothing had changed. That same DW. The same CN. He forced himself out of it, shaking his head mutely. He was being irrational. It was most likely someone talking a random detour, undeterred by the unkept, rough appearance of the trail. A one-time rig.

Still, it didn’t stop him from tracing his fingers down the four letters, feeling a small kindling of camaraderie in the touch.

A week passed.

The day began like normal: shower, emails, tea, hopelessly scribble on thick canvas paper and dabble on keyboards in search of the inspiration that had swiftly flown out of his mind for longer than he could remember. It was cloudy today, grey streaks overhead. There was a Canadian goose on his roof. Castiel took his sketchpad out to the front porch, where he craned his neck to see the visitor, traced a rough sketch of its silhouette on the top of the paper, gazed at it for a while, sighed, then tucked his sketchpad back into the inner pocket of his coat. No use going back to put it away. Besides, maybe he would see those cardinals again on his walk.

The weather got muggier as he reached the bridge, and by the time he stepped onto the planks, the coat felt restricting and overbearing on his shoulders. He unbuttoned it to let some of the air out, and unconsciously ran his hand across the rough surface of the wood—dry, now.

He stifled a gasp when he felt the new markings graze across his fingertips.

He glanced down.

_HI._

Castiel felt the same smile fighting to surface on his face. Two letters, that was it. But it was carved with the same depth, the same crooked lines. One needed to be concise when communicating via carvings, he reasoned.

The pen was still in his pocket, and he absentmindedly tapped a rhythm against the wood as he pondered the message to write in response.

He was about to raise it, preparing himself for a more arduous _HELLO,_ until a sudden idea made him stop.

Before he could think about for longer, he had his paper pad out, flipped to the newest sketch—a dark beak, wings outstretched in a lazy flap. He gripped the edge of the paper and with a firm yank, it ripped cleanly from the binding.

The railing of the bridge was supported by a few wooden beams, one of them right below the carvings. Castiel wrapped the paper, drawing-side in, around the pole, tucking one corner so that it would stay.

He straightened and, after a moment of thought, underlined the original _HI_ with a sharp line below it.

He tried not to let himself feel stupid for leaving an arbitrary drawing for someone he’d probably never meet, who probably wouldn’t even see the paper wrapped around the beam, and who, even if they did, had a chance of finding ink-smeared, soggy paper fibres instead of a drawing of a goose—why did he leave _that_ of all things? Would they be, for some outlandish, unexpected reason, offended? Uncomfortable? Disturbed?

Before he could overthink himself into a whammy, Castiel turned around and hurried home.

He tried to suppress the ridiculous hope in his chest when, for the next one, two, three hours, all the way overnight and turning around to the next morning, not a single drop of rain fell.

DW probably wasn’t even there yet, he told himself when he neared his destination. If past patterns rang true, they wouldn’t be there for another few days—maybe even longer. Maybe never, and the second time had been a fluke.

But the paper was still there, and there was something around the outside of it that wasn’t there before. Castiel detached it from the wood, smoothed it out on the railing, and read the message.

_CUTE :)_

It was written in an inky, deep-blue gel pen. Castiel flipped the paper over to find that, over top of the original sketch, somebody had given the goose a pair of navy sunglasses and a blueberry ice cream cone attached to an outstretched wing.

Castiel was abashed to find rising in him an odd fluttering feeling that was not entirely unlike wings, as if the goose had decided to take residence inside his stomach.

Ridiculous. He scolded himself. He didn’t even know the person. (He ignored the voice that told him it was a heavily-masculine handwriting, and thus landed them right in Castiel’s ballpark. Ignored the bizarre magnetism of the one singular word, the unexpected allure in the two simple letters.) He stood there for a moment, debating on what to do.

He had been keeping a 2B pencil inside his pocket, right next to the inkless ballpoint; had slipped it in that morning, lying to himself and downplaying it as a casual gesture and nothing else. Now, he took it out, dribbled the eraser end against the (now lightly rumpled) paper for a moment, then began to draw.

It was rough and spur-of-the-moment, a half-finished thought emerging on paper as his pencil ran across the bumpy wood and left trembling lines on the sheet.

By the time he finished, there was an outline of his house beneath the bird, along with a bit more—the patterned shingles on his roof, his window with a potted plant on the ledge, the scruffy old welcome-mat he’d been meaning to replace for years, but never came around to doing.

He flipped it back over, scribbled a quick _thank you_ below the message, and returned it to its home.

_COME ON, MAN. YOU’RE MAKING ME LOOK BAD._

On the other side: a clumsy drawing of a mildly glorified stick figure next to Castiel’s house, complete with straw hair and a gummy, toothless, half-moon smile. A guy, then, judging from the blocky torso. His shirt was cross-hatched with flannel, and his boots were oversized.

 _sorry,_ Castiel wrote, and then added himself, sitting on the steps of the front porch with a mug of tea in his hands, the steam rising and obscuring his features. On the lawn, he drew a large oak tree, and in the branches, he added a criss-crossing of a nest, complete with a bird flying to it from inches away.

Castiel had a new routine.

They’d established some sort of quiet, anonymous rapport. Castiel came in the mornings and left a message for DW to read later in the day. The next morning, he’d return to find an addition: a comment, a reply, another question lobbied back for him to receive. Small, almost inconsequential things about one another, but every word gave Castiel a cozy, carefree thrill. _HAD THE BEST CHERRY PIE TODAY. SAW THE NEW BOND MOVIE - NOT ENOUGH GADGETS. ALMOST SLIPPED RIGHT HERE - WATCH YOUR STEP!_

Castiel would retaliate with his own. _i baked an apple strudel today. i finished a collection of short stories written by h.p.lovecraft. i saw two chickadees and a woodpecker on my way here._ Always with another detail added to the drawing, whether that be a few strokes or a completely new creation. Castiel drew a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched atop his forehead, DW drew an ACDC logo on his t-shirt, and with every day, the veil covering the other was lifted by a fraction of an inch, word by word and line by line. 

Castiel felt particularly introspective one windy morning, taking an extra long time to shade in the panels of his shingles, adding a bit of detail to perspective here and there. Upon his departure, he watched a loose flap of the paper dancing in the breeze, and imagined that it was a greeting, a cheerful wave of a hand.

 _ARE YOU AN ARTIST? YOU’RE REALLY GOOD._ In the drawing, DW now had smiley eyes and a knobby thumbs up.

 _no, a writer actually. what about you?_ Castiel added a pile of books next to where he was sitting on the front steps.

 _MECHANIC. YOU WRITE ANYTHING I’D RECOGNIZE?_ DW had a scribble of ink newly blooming over his hands, patchworks scattered on his pants: motor oil.

 _not unless you enjoy quantum physics. a mechanic? do you enjoy working with cars?_ Castiel added a wrench in DW’s hands. A few more clouds, a sun in the sky.

 _DAMN._ Written with an arrow pointing to the words _quantum physics,_ which was circled in large, easy loops and surrounded with exclamation marks. _HELL YEAH - YOU SHOULD SEE MY BABY SOMETIME._ A clunky drawing of something vaguely with wheels. A stroller?

 _you have a child?_ Castiel penciled in a tiny human next to DW, holding his hand and sucking his thumb.

 _HAHAHA NO I MEANT MY CAR._ The tiny human was crossed out with a single slash, and the stroller that turned out not to be a stroller after all elongated into a more detailed framework, sleek curves and lines emerging from the form.

 _interesting._ Feeling guilty for the mistake, Castiel carefully erased the drawing of a child, and turned the slash of ink that remained into a light breeze, sending a flurry of leaves cascading over DW.

_I’M NOT EVEN DATING ANYONE RIGHT NOW, ACTUALLY. YOU?_

Nothing added to the drawing this time. Castiel wasn’t sure what would need to be added, anyway. He gazed at the sketch that was now a full-blown picture, right down to the wristwatch on his arm and the phone in DW’s pocket, bits and pieces of both their lives weaved into the paper. It was as complete as it ever would be.

Castiel stared at the message for a long time, and then chewed nervously on his lip while he wrote his response.

_i’m not, either._

Castiel awoke to a muggy, dim room, and the telltale pittering of rain outside his bedroom window.

He lay there for a moment, smiling at the soothing sound, until a thought hit him and the smile was wiped clear off his face.

He shot up from his bed and drew his curtain aside. The rain was heavy and hard, pouring down his window in thick rivulets. The pavement was darkened to a chalky black, and the grass was nearly flattened with the force of the wind.

Castiel didn’t make his tea. He grabbed his coat and dashed out the door and ran all the way down the street, past the forest entrance, his shoes squelching in the waterlogged dirt and seeping into his socks, all the way to the bridge, until he was soaked, hair plastered to his forehead, and breathing hard.

The roll of paper was gone.

Castiel looked at the empty beam of wood for a long time, thinking that it seemed oddly, starkly, naked. Dribbles of rain rolled down his nose and dripped off his chin.

He stepped forwards and ran his fingers along the pair of initials that started it all, feeling something twinge inside his stomach.

_Everything beautiful is ruined eventually._

He saw that line in a movie somewhere, floating in from the dim, muted outskirts of his memory. He watched the ripples of water form in the enlarged stream, circles growing larger until they eventually disappeared. A tiny, grey trout splashed downstream, energized by the rain. Castiel went home.

It stopped raining later that day.

Castiel was sitting at his desk with his makeup mug of tea, in front of his laptop, trying to convince himself that doing nothing was going to write his paper all by itself, when the doorbell rang.

He frowned. He hadn’t remembered ordering anything.

He took a steeling sip, letting the warmth settle in his stomach, before setting it down on the desk and heading for the door.

He opened it, and for a moment, he just stood there.

The man on the other side of the door stared back for a minute, expression mellowly resembling a deer in headlights, before coughing and clearing his throat, looking away.

“Hi,” he said. His voice was rough and soft at the same time, like desert sand.

“Can I help you?” Castiel said, perplexed and trying not to stare. In his defence, it had been years since he’d spoken face-to-face with anyone other than his publisher, and this was not a good way to ease back into it. He felt as if he’d been chucked into the deep end after years of simmering high and dry, and the water was the greenest green he’d ever seen.

“Yeah, um. Okay, this is gonna sound really weird.” The man rubbed the back of his neck with a hand. When he removed it, Castiel noticed a streak of black along the thumb. Motor oil, he thought, and felt it like a punch to the gut.

The man was wearing flannel, red instead of gel-ink blue. At that point, he must’ve caught the dumbstruck look on Castiel’s face, too, because he grimaced and took a step back.

“Ah, shit,” he said. “I’m really bad at this.”

“Bad at what?” Castiel said.

The man took something out of his pockets, and Castiel felt the jolt all the way to his toes. It was unmistakable, the scrawls of blue ink and graphite curves seeming to shine in the murky grey light.

“Just,” he muttered, his face flushing a gentle pink and making the freckles on his cheeks stand out. He shoved the paper towards Castiel.

Castiel unrolled it.

_i’m not, either._

_WANNA CHANGE THAT FOR BOTH OF US?_

He flipped it over. The stick figure was holding a bunch of poorly-drawn flowers in one hand, and, next to him, there was a tiny doodle of a heart.

“I don’t have the flowers, though,” the man said.

Castiel couldn’t speak.

“I know, it’s really weird,” the man blurted before Castiel could scourge up any words. “I don’t even know your _name,_ but it’s like I _know_ you. At least—at least a little bit. And I know for sure that I wanna know you more. And I just, yesterday night it was starting to rain so I took the drawing home, and then I came across your tree with the birdsnest and the welcome mat and the shingles on the roof, and it looked so familiar, and, I dunno, I just felt like I—really, really, wanted to see you. Fuck, please don’t think I’m creepy.”

The man wrung his hands, looking distressed and frazzled, with a tiny spark of fragile hope flickering in his eyes.

“What’s your name?” Castiel asked.

The man looked startled. “Dean. Dean Winchester.”

Castiel felt a smile spread across his face. “Hello, Dean. I’m Castiel Novak.”

Dean blinked, and then he seemed to lose a few tons in his shoulders, face brightening like the sun coming out after a rainy afternoon. “Heya, Cas,” he said softly.

No one had ever called Castiel that before. Gabriel had called him Cassie, but only as a tease to rile him up. He would probably have a field day over this. Castiel liked the way it sounded coming from Dean.

“So,” Castiel said. “What now?”

Dean wouldn’t stop smiling at him. “Wanna go for a walk? I know this awesome trail a few minutes away. It’s even got a bridge and all.”

“That sounds great,” Castiel said.

Dean grinned. “Then let’s go.”

Castiel hurried back inside to put on his coat. He finished his tea in two great big gulps.

When Dean faux-casually brushed his knuckles along Castiel’s, Castiel grabbed Dean’s hand and held on tight. Dean squeezed right back, and Castiel listened to the cardinals chirping all the way down the street.

**Author's Note:**

> The quote "Everything beautiful is ruined eventually" comes from the movie The Half Of It.
> 
> If you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading. It means a lot to me. Kudos and comments make me smile.
> 
> <3


End file.
